Two Lost Souls on a Dirty Night - Grace Theatre - 2000

Two Lost Souls on a Dirty Night: Paco and Tonho work in a street market in a huge metropolis. Both are young and poor. Tonho is full of dreams but cannot look for a better job with the pair of shoes he's got. Pack has beautiful, brand new shoes. The conflict is hence established. Written by Plínio Marcos, the founding father of a Brazilian proletarian theatre, Marcos' naturalistic two-hander deals with two street kids who fight over a new pair of shoes. Plínio Marcos never had a formal education, was a circus clown, mechanic and footballer. He writes about the underground, his characters are the dispossessed - as he himself was. The play was Critics' Choice in The Metro newspaper and established the company's reputation as a "terrifying force with universal relevance". The play was Critics' Choice in The Metro newspaper and established the company's reputation as a "terrifying force with universal relevance".

”No gently pleasurable theatre evening here. This play by the Brazilian Plinio Marcos, who died last year will keep you on the edge of your seats. Marina Mindlin's stage design is an apt cocoon to hatch darkness, and it will hold your straining eyes captive to every meaningless prop. The dialogue you wish you were not hearing will keep your ears pinned to every uncouth syllable mispronounced by these utterly convincing actors in their journey through the bowels of life and language. The plot really is the interaction of two young men living and labouring in the festering lower reaches of life's pond; the room they share. They exist in a mutual dependency they both hate and need.

The success of the mercurial dialogue was in part due to the inspired translation of Henrik Carbonnier, a breathtaking ride along the dumbing down of language, and the fluid repartee of the fine young actors, on the one hand Marc Elliott, a latter day cockney who calls his shoes his treadies, and on the other Edward Cosgrove, playing a rigid East European. Both played lost souls so well that we are numbed numbed and left with rare attention on a level of society we normally bar from our thoughts.”

''Marc Elliott plays Paco so convincingly that the desire to get up and thump him when he starts his jibes is almost overwhelming. He throws himself exuberantly around the well-designed set, hardly keeping still for a moment. Edword Cosgrove takes on the more contemplative role of Tonho well. The terrifying force of the play, and its universal relevance, is conveyed brilliantly in this translation by Henrik Carbonnier, who hasn’t balked at keeping the language colourful.”

Siobhan Murphy – The Metro (Critic’s Choice)

''One of the great things about this play is the way it shows that suffering doesn’t make you a nicer person and that there is no solidarity for those at the bottom of the heap. Marc Elliott as the wheedling, goading Paco and Edward Cosgrove as Tonho, a confused young man at war with his animal instinct to survive and his better, gentler nature, are good enough to give the evening credibility.”